'''George C. Homans''' (born in [[Boston]], Massachusetts August 11, [[1910]]. Died in Cambridge, Massachusetts May 29, [[1989]]) was the American founder of [[behavioral sociology]] and the [[exchange theory]].

+

'''George C. Homans''' (born in [[Boston]], Massachusetts August 11, [[1910]]. Died in Cambridge, Massachusetts May 29, [[1989]]) was the American founder of [[behavioral sociology]] and the [[social exchange theory]].

Outside the academic discipline of sociology, Homans is perhaps best known for his model of [[work]] group behavior where the "[[emergent behavior]]" (informal [[organisation]]s) comes between the requirements and plans of the [[management]], derived from technological, social and economic environment, and [[work productivity]] and [[satisfaction]].

Outside the academic discipline of sociology, Homans is perhaps best known for his model of [[work]] group behavior where the "[[emergent behavior]]" (informal [[organisation]]s) comes between the requirements and plans of the [[management]], derived from technological, social and economic environment, and [[work productivity]] and [[satisfaction]].

Within sociology and social psychology, Homans is regarded as one of the major sociological theorists in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. His ideas about theoretical principles in sociology were much debated and often rejected.

As a theorist, Homans’s overall intellectual ambition was to create a more unified social science on a firm theoretical basis. His approach to theory developed in two phases, usually interpreted by commentators as inductive and deductive, respectively. Although this is a bit of an oversimplification, it provides a framework for outlining his theoretical contributions.

The key work in the first phase of his work is The Human Group (1950). Homans proposes that social reality should be described at three levels: social events, customs, and analytical hypotheses that describe the processes by which customs arise and are maintained or changed. Hypotheses are formulated in terms of relationships among variables such as frequency of interaction, similarity of activities, intensity of sentiment, and conformity to norms. Using notable sociological and anthropological field studies as the grounding for such general ideas, the book makes a persuasive case for treating groups as social systems that can be analyzed in terms of a verbal analogue of the mathematical method of studying equilibrium and stability of systems. In his theoretical analyses of these groups, he begins to use ideas that later loomed large in his work, e.g., reinforcement and exchange. Along the way, he treats important general phenomena such as social control, authority, recipocity, and ritual.

By 1958, when he published an important article, "Social Behavior as Exchange," Homans had come to the view that theory should be expressed as a deductive system, in this respect falling under the influence of the logical empiricist philosophers of that period. Substantively, he argued that a satisfactory explanation in the social sciences to be based upon "propositions" -- principles -- about individual behavior that are drawn from the behavioral psychology of the time. For instance, the choice of a behavior is a matter of its likelihood of leading to a more favorable net reward (i.e., reward less cost) than alternatives available. Social behavior as exchange means that a plurality of individuals, each postulated to behave according to the stated behavioral principles, form a system of interaction. Social approval is the basic reward that people can given to one another. In much greater detail, he developed this approach in his book Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, (1961, revised 1974).

In its mature (1974) form, Homans’s theory rests upon two metatheoretical claims, namely, (1) the basic principles of social science must be true of individuals as members of the human species, not as members of particular groups or cultures; and (2) any other generalizations or facts about human social life will be derivable from these principles (and suitable initial conditions). Another way to grasp his argument is to interpret it as striving to explain spontaneous social order, a point developed in detail by Fararo (2001). Homans's approach is an example of methodological individualism in social science, also favored by some more recent influential social theorists, particularly those who have adopted some form of rational choice theory (e.g., (James S. Coleman) that enables greater deductive fertility in theorizing -- albeit often with a cost in terms of some loss of realism.